HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Three boys' skeletons. Three graves in a grove of live oaks weeping resurrection ferns in north Florida. Twenty-four hours to exhume the bones and check the area for undiscovered graves. What's a forensic anthropologist to do?

Dr. Bill Brockton of the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee uses his experience excavating a Native-American burial site in South Dakota - and calls in a highway crew. If you're careful and you know what you're doing, a road scraper works better than a hand trowel.

Of course, you have to know what to look for before the massive machinery hits a skeleton - those changes in the soil that indicate it's been disturbed. But Brockton's sure of his methods even if he's not sure they'll yield results.

Get your copy of "The Bone Yard"signed by the book's authors

Jefferson Bass, the writing team responsible
for "The Body Farm" phenomenon, will sign
copies of the new book at the U.S. Space &
Rocket Center in Huntsville at 6 p.m. today.

Collaborative effort

Learn about the factual source of the fictional Brockton's methods and find out more about the mystery of "The Bone Yard" during a local appearance by author Jefferson Bass, aka the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and journalist Jon Jefferson, who grew up in Guntersville.

Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, is the real-life Body Farm detective, and Jefferson chronicles his exploits. They've collaborated on nonfiction documentaries and books about Bass' work at the Body Farm, which he founded in the early 1980s, as well as a series of Body Farm-based novels.

Bass and Jefferson talked about their partnership during a conference call interview with The Times.

"Basically we'll kick around ideas for the plot and figure out roughly where the story's going," Jefferson said. "I'll start in writing and then I'll call Bill and say, 'Help. I've got a scene where such and such happens. If a body's found in this sort of setting and it's been there for this amount of time and this is how they were killed, what would you look for? What kind of condition is that body likely to be in? How much evidence is likely to still be there?'"

Their protagonist, Bill Brockton, has Bass' sunny disposition, but he also has some of Jefferson's traits.

"A lot of that character is inspired, of course, by Dr. Bass and his forensic knowledge and his cheerfulness in the face of all this gruesomeness that Dr. Brockton is working with," Jefferson said. "But there are also dimensions of Dr. Brockton, maybe more now than originally, that come from me. Dr. Brockton has some lapses in judgment. He's more impulsive and impetuous than Bill Bass is, and therefore he ends up having more adventures than he otherwise might have."

At cock fights and drag shows, for instance.

"In the first book ('Carved in Bone'), Dr. Brockton inadvertently finds himself at a cock fight in east Tennessee," Jefferson said. "Dr. Bass would never find himself at a cock fight, but, in fact, Jon Jefferson went to a cock fight to research that scene. In the second book ('Flesh and Bone'), there was some research at a drag show in a gay bar in Chattanooga."

For "The Bone Yard," Jefferson visited the National Archives to research ways to open a water-logged diary. He also stopped by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where a man showed him how he does digital facial reconstruction.

Bass and Jefferson said they aim to educate their readers in an entertaining way.

"I don't know of other mystery writers who draw on fact as much as we do," Jefferson said, "and this book is a really good example of that. It was inspired by this horrific reform school in Florida, but also anthropological fact, this technique of excavation that Bill pioneered out in South Dakota."

Ancient burial sites

From 1956 to 1970, Bass spent most summers in the Great Plains excavating Native-American burial sites set to be covered up by a series of dams built by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Missouri River. Bass and his colleagues started the process digging by hand, but that yielded only about 20 to 25 per summer, and the waters were rising.

"So we started using heavy power equipment in removing the foot of sterile soil that had blown in on top of the burials," Bass explained.

"When you dig in the ground, you can never put the dirt back as carefully as nature put it there originally. So if you know what to look for, soil will be less compacted. When you put the soil back in, it will have a color change because you're using topsoil into the subsoil. These are things we learned to look for, and these are things Jon used in recovering the burials from the boys reformatory."

That's another subject about which they hope to educate their readers: problems in the juvenile justice system.

"This novel speaks to an issue that I think is important, which is how we treat troubled youth in our society," Jefferson said. "Too often they're treated like they're just young prisoners. When kids get sent to reform school, they come out more damaged in general than reformed. It's ironic that they're called reform schools when what they often are is training academies for career criminals."

Jefferson recalled a recent conversation with a man who was sent to reform school at age 13.

"He got two terrible floggings while he was there. He got 40 lashes the first time and 25 to 30 lashes the second time. He has spent almost 50 years trying to reclaim his life because he was so destroyed by the experiences that happened to him in this reform school. That's appalling that kids who are part of the system of juvenile justice end up getting treated so badly rather than being helped.

"So if this book can do anything to draw attention to that and help lessen that as a problem, I'll be really proud and pleased."